Long Journey Home, Part 1

from: Intermediate Flatpicking Guitar with Scott Nygaard

This lesson is part of the course Intermediate Flatpicking Guitar with Scott Nygaard.

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Learn to play fiddle tunes and other bluegrass and roots melodies, with an emphasis on alternate picking, simple scales, and developing good picking- and fretting-hand technique. Designed for guitarists just starting to play melodies as well as intermediate players who want to work on their flatpicking technique.

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Sally Gooden

The B part of “Sally Gooden” starts with a simple scale fragment, starting on the open G, that may be familiar from the Alternating Picking video. Scott walks you through the melody of the B part phrase by phrase, and gives you advice on keeping your fretting-hand fingers in position above the notes, as well as “planting” them: keeping them down on the fret until after you play the next note in the phrase.These are very important things to work on, as they give your playing a lot of fluidity and make your fingering more efficient.

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The Intermediate Flatpicking Guitar Subscription Includes:

A step-by-step approach to mastering flatpicking technique
More than 40 extensive video lessons
34 complete tunes and songs to play, with variations
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In-depth lessons on flatpicking and fretting-hand technique
High-quality video with multiple camera angles so you can see closeups of both hands in action
Play-Along Tracks so you can practice what you’ve learned

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Long Journey Home

Long Journey Home, Part 1

Long Journey Home, Part 2

Long Journey Home, Part 3: Melody Play-Along Track

Long Journey Home, Part 4: Rhythm Play-Along Track

Long Journey Home, Part 1

To play a melody-based solo on the bluegrass standard “Long Journey Home,” first recorded by the Monroe Brothers in the late 1930s and by many others since, you can start by adding lead-in runs to the main melody notes. The melody of “Long Journey Home” is very repetitive, with one simple phrase used three times, so it’s a good song to work on creating variations to simple melodies. In this lesson, Scott shows you a few variations on the repeated line, including some syncopated ideas, as well as how to finish off your solo with a bang, using a long fiddle tune–like line on the last two measures. You’ll learn the basic melody and the first half of the solo to “Long Journey Home” in this video.

"Long Journey Home" (Available to subscribers)

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